This blog is about family, including those in my family tree, the primary focus, but also the family of faith, the family of community, and ultimately the family of man. It is a journey of discovery: Who they were, What they did (and Why), and When, Where, and How they lived.

Angus Deaton, the Nobel-prize winning economist (who also sits on the advisory board of HumanProgress.org), recently reiterated his belief that on the whole the world is getting better – if not, as he accepted, everywhere or for everyone at once.

A Kansas Resident's Upset the Children In a Viral Adoption Listing Are White
Just when you thought the obsession with race in this country couldn’t get any worse, it gets worse. One Kansas resident is a leading contender for the position of "Worst Person In the Entire World" for her racially-charged reaction to siblings who were merely looking for a family to adopt them so they could stay together.

It's becoming too easy for federal agencies to steer private activity without issuing "real" regulations anymore. Instead, we get regulatory dark matter -- particularly as the economy becomes more technologically advanced. Beyond the dozens of laws and thousands of federal rules and regulations that you can look up, agencies issue thousands of proclamations like memoranda, guidance documents, notices, circulars and administrative interpretations. Already, the President has taken steps towards regulatory reform. Hopefully, the administration will incorporate regulatory dark matter into future actions to "deconstruct the regulatory state."

Today, the Competitive Enterprise (CEI) released the 2017 update to its comprehensive report Mapping Washington’s Lawlessness: An Inventory of “Regulatory Dark Matter.” This analysis covers how, in addition to Congress’s own laws and the many thousands of rules issued by unelected regulators, regulatory dark matter exists in the form of thousands of additional issuances from executive and independent agencies. This dark matter goes around Congress, the Administrative Procedure Act’s (APA) public notice and comment requirements, and the American people themselves.

Obama administration spent $36MILLION trying to keep government records secret during its final year
The Obama administration spent a record $36.2 million on legal costs in its last year in office in an attempt to keep government records secret. For a second consecutive year, the administration set a record for the number of times federal employees said they couldn't find a single page of files that were requested under the Freedom of Information Act. And it set records for the outright denial of access to files, refusing to quickly consider requests described as especially newsworthy, and forcing people to pay for records.

________

from EUobserver

Scottish independence ignites Brexit debate
Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon will start the process for an independence vote next week, while British prime minister Theresa May insists that Scotland will have to follow the UK out of the EU and the single market.

UK parliament clears way for Brexit talks
UK MPs refuse to guarantee the rights of EU citizens in the UK and do not expect a "meaningful vote" at the end of the Brexit talks, as May gets ready to trigger Article 50.

Rutte and Wilders clash on EU ahead of Dutch vote
Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, of the centre-right Liberals, and anti-Islam anti-EU MP Geert Wilders clashed on Monday (13 March) over the EU in one of the few election debates featuring the pair of them, two days before polling day. While Wilders said a Netherlands exit from the European Union would be “the best thing that could happen to us”, Rutte said a "Nexit" would cost 1.5 million jobs and create “chaos”.Erdogan tells Dutch not to vote for PM Rutte or Wilders

________

from FEE(Foundation for Economic Education)

[Information from this site may not be reliable.]

Vault 7 Confirms, You're Right to Be Paranoid
On March 7, the transparency/disclosure activists at Wikileaks began releasing a series of documents titled “Vault 7.” According to the New York Times, Vault 7 consists of “thousands of pages describing sophisticated software tools and techniques used by the [US Central Intelligence Agency] to break into smartphones, computers and even Internet-connected televisions.” Bottom line: You should accept the possibility that for the last several years, anything you’ve done on or in the presence of a device that can connect to the Internet was observed, monitored, and archived as accessible data. The abuses of our privacy implied by the WikiLeaks dump aren’t an aberration. They’re the norm. They’re what government does.

Money Won't Save the Failing Public School System
Sadly, the government seems to be most inefficient in areas where we all hope for good results. Education is a powerful (and sad) example. School choice is the only way to provide the best quality education at the lowest costs.

Medical Entitlements Make Care Expensive
None of the emerging, alternative healthcare bills are addressing the one elephant in the room that must be slain before anything resembling a free market in healthcare can emerge: entitlements.

Daylight Saving Began as “War Time"
Daylight Saving Time was first introduced to support World War I. Today, the negative impacts of the time change outweigh the purported benefits.

Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State
Most people are aware of the influence of Karl Marx and his ideological compatriots in building 20th-century totalitarianism. But there is another tradition of thought, dating from the early 19th century and continuing through the interwar period, that took a different route in coming to roughly the same conclusions regarding the place of the state in our lives. As opposed to Marx’s “left-Hegelians,” these thinkers are part of the “right-Hegelian” movement who dispensed with the universalism of Marx to applaud nation, race, and war as the essence of life.

________

from First Things

SOURCES OF INEQUALITYCivilization produces inequality. If this is right, the question for egalitarians is: What price are you willing to pay for equality? What creates inequality of wealth?

________

from The Heritage Foundation

[Information from this site may be unreliable.]

Pakistan Could Easily Become a Nuclear Hazard. Here’s What Needs to Be Done.
If the U.S. stays soft on Pakistan, the risks of nuclear proliferation will only increase. Far from stigmatizing Pakistan or proposing a witch hunt, our report provides a sound and practical way forward for improving the prospects for stability in the region, reducing global terrorist threats, and providing the basis for a stronger U.S.-Pakistan partnership over the long term.

________

from HumanProgress.org

Education Website

Five graphs that will change your mind about poverty
Throughout most of human history, poverty was the norm. Then the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution caused income to skyrocket – forever changing the way we live. Angus Deaton, the Nobel-prize winning economist (who also sits on the advisory board of HumanProgress.org), recently reiterated his belief that on the whole the world is getting better – if not, as he accepted, everywhere or for everyone at once. Perhaps that comes as no surprise, but the idea that the world is getting better in regards to poverty is actually a deeply unpopular view.

Financial reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show Tuesday evening after receiving a leaked “client copy” of the first two pages of President Donald Trumps 2005 federal tax return in his “mailbox.” The two pages released by MSNBC show that “President Donald Trump earned $153 million and paid $36.5 million in income taxes in 2005.”

Former CIA counterterrorism officer John Kiriakou writes, “Is it so hard to believe that there are elements of the government that don’t like the fact that Trump is rocking their boat or not allowing them primacy in policymaking, a status they enjoyed under both Obama and Bush? As Intercept columnist Glenn Greenwald noted, disliking and distrusting Trump and disliking and distrusting the CIA are not mutually exclusive. It’s not a zero-sum game. Same with the FBI. It’s possible to have a scenario with no good guy.” One of the things that most observers don’t understand is that the CIA will do anything – anything – to survive. All CIA officers are taught to lie. They lie all the time, about everything, to everybody. And they justify it by trying to convince themselves that they are doing it in the national interest, for national security.

A network of Clinton connected organizations are leading the effort to discredit Trump through misinformation and outright lies. The campaign waged against the new President of the United States by the sponsors of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the destruction of the Greater Middle East is on-going. After the Womens’ March on 22 January, a March for Science is scheduled to be held not only in the USA, but also throughout the Western world on 22 April. It’s goal is to show that Donald Trump is not only a misogynist, but also an obscurantist.

In a possible sign of things to come, the New York Times recently published a piece in which the establishment cites its worry that the private Federal Reserve could soon be targeted by the populist wave that elected Donald Trump. The piece comes amid reports the the fed is set to implement policy that is in stark contrast with the goals of the new president, pitting the central bankers against a president who has shown he isn’t afraid to get rid of those working against his agenda.

Is the Era of Ultralow Interest Rates Coming to a Close?The financial press pretends that there's some grand shift away from the Fed's official low interest rate policy. This narrative is highly misleading. The Wall Street Journal writes on tomorrow's FOMC rate announcement that "[a] long era of ultralow interest rates and bond-buying programs may be drawing to a close." This is remarkable. The minuscule uptick from the .5-.75% range to a .75-1% range is hardly leaving behind ultralow interest rates. As can be seen in the chart below, a quarter percent rise in the federal funds rate will barely show up, when looking at rates from a longer-term perspective.

Hugh Hewitt Throws a Tantrum About the Austrian School (and Much More)In an oddly jumbled article for the Washington Post, Hugh Hewitt last week somehow managed to group together both opponents of the Export-Import Bank and supporters of so-called sanctuary cities as enemies of the "rule of law." Never mind, of course, that the arguments against the Ex-Im Bank and the arguments for sanctuary cities have nothing in common. Hewitt, however, faced with the opportunity to attack his enemies in WaPo decided he'd find some way to mash them all together as targets for his attack.

How the Fed Operates — And Why It's a ProblemCentral bankers often claim their tinkering with the money supply is but a small intervention, but in reality, it sets the boom-bust cycle in motion. We are often asked about the mechanisms by which the US Federal Reserve Board (the Fed) influences the level of US interest rates and whether these mechanisms also influence the level of the US money supply. It has long been regarded that the Fed no longer inflates and contracts the money supply but rather simply acts to target interest rates. The purpose of this brief paper is to clarify how the Fed works and the impact that its operations have on the money supply.

Survey: Queen Mary severely rusted, could cost $300M to fix
The Queen Mary is so corroded that it’s at urgent risk of flooding or collapse and the price tag for fixing up the 1930s ocean liner could near $300 million, according to a survey. Documents obtained by the Long Beach Press-Telegram (http://bit.ly/2npGoX8 ) state it would likely take five years to rehab the ship, a tourist destination docked permanently in Long Beach Harbor south of Los Angeles.

Goodyear retires blimps but keeps familiar form in flight
Goodyear is letting the helium out of the last of its fabled fleet of blimps. But you’ll still see a familiar blue-and-gold form floating over your favorite sports event or awards show long after the California-based “Spirit of Innovation” goes flat Tuesday. Although its replacement, “Wingfoot Two,” will look about the same when it arrives at Goodyear’s California airship base in Carson later this year, it will be a semi-rigid dirigible.

Rivers, streams and lakes rise to flood stage across Spokane region
Rivers, streams and lakes across the Inland Northwest were rising to flood stage Tuesday with the peak runoff likely to arrive Wednesday and continue into the weekend. Also, the temperature in Spokane hit 60 degrees before 4 p.m. Tuesday, creating good conditions to melt lower-elevation snow.